Imagination Demos Oculus Rift with Samsung Galaxy S4

During this week’s Siggraph 2013 in Anaheim, CA we got an opportunity to check out something that we didn’t expect to happen for some time. Mobile VR gaming. Granted, the current setup is nowhere near mobile, but the real achievement is that Imagination Technologies was able to demonstrate Oculus’ Rift VR headset operating within their own demo on a Samsung Galaxy S4 smartphone.

If you look at their setup, it’s fairly simple and straightforward and is mostly used for setup. This current setup is nowhere near ready for deployment on smartphones and tablets as the entire demo is self-looped. However, the demo works flawlessly and there appears to be no more lag than when using a PC. As some people well know, one of the biggest limitations of the Oculus Rift was that it required a PC desktop in order to operate. Now, with this development, it appears that we could theoretically have VR headsets for our smartphones as well as our PCs and use them interchangeably.

Obviously, this is designed to show the capability of Imagination Technologies’ GPU which resides within the Samsung Galaxy S4 (internationl edition). And by extension the relatively simplicity and smoothness that can be obtained when using a desktop computing interface and porting it to a powerful mobile platform. In our conversation with the guys at Imagination they stated that the Rift was nowhere near the GPU load that the Galaxy S4 is capable of handling and that they are pretty confident that they can support the HD Rift when they get their hands on it.